PRESUPPOSITION

CREATED BY ABDIRAIM KYZY BEGAIYM

CONTENT:

1) Introduction
2) Definition
3) background belief
4) Conclusion
• In the branch of linguistics known as pragmatics, a presupposition (or PSP) is
a concept in linguistics and philosophy of language that refers to the
Assumption or shared knowledge that the speaker implies the listener already
has or shares. Examples of presuppositions include:

• Jane no longer writes fiction.

• Presupposition: Jane once wrote fiction.
• Have you stopped eating meat?
• Presupposition: you had once eaten meat.
• Have you talked to Hans?
• Presupposition: Hans exists.
• A presupposition must be mutually known or
assumed by the speaker and addressee for the
utterance to be considered appropriate in context.
• It will generally remain a necessary assumption
whether the utterance is placed in the form of an
assertion, denial, or question, and can be
associated with a specific lexical item or
grammatical feature (presupposition trigger) in
the utterance.
• Crucially, negation of an expression does not change its
presuppositions:
• I want to do it again and I don't want to do it again both
presuppose that the subject has done it already one or more
times;
• My wife is pregnant and My wife is not pregnant both presuppose
that the subject has a wife. In this respect, presupposition is
distinguished from entailment and implicature.
• For example, The president was assassinated entails that The
president is dead, but if the expression is negated, the entailment
is not necessarily true.
• If presuppositions of a sentence are not
consistent with the actual state of affairs, then
one of two approaches can be taken. Given the
sentences My wife is pregnant and My wife is
not pregnant when one has no wife, then either:

• Both the sentence and its negation are false; or

• Strawson's approach: Both "my wife is pregnant"
and "my wife is not pregnant" use a wrong
presupposition (i.e. that there exists a referent
which can be described with the noun phrase
my wife) and therefore can not be assigned
truth values.
 A presupposition of a part of an utterance is sometimes also a
presupposition of the whole utterance, and sometimes not.

For instance, the phrase my wife triggers the presupposition that I

have a wife. The first sentence below carries that presupposition, even
though the phrase occurs inside an embedded clause.
In the second sentence, however, it does not.

John might be mistaken about his belief that I have a wife, or he might
be deliberately trying to misinform his audience, and this has an effect
on the meaning of the second sentence, but, perhaps surprisingly, not
on the first one.
 A presupposition is background belief, relating to an
utterance, that

must be mutually known or assumed by the speaker and

addressee for the utterance to be considered appropriate
in context
generally will remain a necessary assumption whether
the utterance is placed in the form of an assertion, denial,
or question, and
can generally be associated with a specific lexical item
or grammatical feature (presupposition trigger) in the
utterance.
Bibliography:

1) Wikipedia Presupposition
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presupposition

2) GLOSSARY OF LINGUISTIC TERMS

https://glossary.sil.org/term/presupposition
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